Turin’s Fiat Plant Reemerges as a Showcase of Modern Design

For more than two decades leading up to his death in 2003 at age 81, Fiat kingpin Giovanni Agnelli was a passionate protagonist in the transformation of Lingotto, the iconic Turin car factory whose cornerstone his grandfather laid in 1916 and which was shuttered in 1982. By that year Fiat had long since established a huge production facility in the former Soviet Union. But with his heart still in Turin, the famously charismatic Agnelli oversaw an international competition to explore new uses for the imposing plant 10 minutes from the city center.

Of the many uses ultimately created for the site, the $33 million Le Meridien Lingotto Art + Tech, a bracingly modern design-driven hotel, may be the most compelling. Furniture and lighting in the property’s 142 loft-like guest rooms and soaring common areas include 20th-century classics by Eileen Gray, Gio Ponti, and Charles and Ray Eames. Before the Art + Tech opened recently, the Turin Palace—a redoubt of the Louis XV style—was the only hotel game in town. No more.

In its salad days Fiat was known to the Turinese as La Mamma, but Lingotto is a powerful symbol of prosperity and entrepreneurship to all Italians. As an early example of modular construction in reinforced concrete, designed by Giacomo Mattè Trucco with a stunning spiral ramp by Vittorio Bonadè Bottino, it captured Le Corbusier’s attention. But what respectful new purpose could be found for the legendary rooftop test track with two steep parabolic bends? How would Agnelli—one of his generation’s most visionary industrialists, wiliest political power brokers and most accomplished lotharios—be remembered?

The prize for reimagining the 800,000-square-foot factory went to Renzo Piano, the Genovese architect whose fame, along with that of his then partner Richard Rogers, was sealed in the 1970s with the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. It has since been burnished by his design for the Kansai International Airport in the Bay of Osaka and by his redevelopment plan for the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Piano’s strategy for Lingotto, as Peter Buchanan writes in the third volume of Renzo Piano Building Workshop, was to convert “a machine-age monument” into “a multifunctional, megastructural microcosm of the post-industrial city”—a civic-minded complex poised at the crossroads of learning and technology, culture and commerce, tourism and athletics: That old test track is now the domain of joggers.

In addition to the Art + Tech, Lingotto has a more than half-mile-long shopping mall, a trade-fair forum, 11 movie theaters, a post office, a travel agency, a food court, a bank, a supermarket, a pharmacy, Fiat’s executive headquarters and the automobile engineering department of Turin Polytechnic University. There’s more: A heliport dialogues with an audaciously cantilevered glass-and-tubular-steel onion dome known as La Bolla (The Bubble). A semi-subterranean auditorium can be ingeniously shrunk for chamber music concerts. The Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli is a six-level art gallery hung with masterpieces—by Canaletto, Picasso, Modigliani —culled from the couple’s celebrated private collection. Lo Scrigno, the gallery’s “jewel box,” is Piano’s annex. Inspired by the foundry at Lingotto, it has a “flying carpet” roof of 1,746 frosted-glass “wings.”

“The project for the Fiat Lingotto factory building and its immediate surroundings in many ways represents an atypical case of urban reconstruction given that the intervention was mainly focused on a single building,” notes Emilio Pizzi in his concise monograph Renzo Piano, “yet the scale and the complexity of the project themes involved fully qualify them as a part of the city.”

The city, Turin, thanks the Art + Tech daily for helping it shed its reputation for stuffiness and musty grandeur. “Our greatest challenge was bringing in natural light,” says Mauro Parravicini, the Milanese architect who collaborated with Piano on the hotel. To that end, the building was roofed in glass, its underside rigged with gently draped white shades strung on cables. “All that glass on its own would have been cold,” explains Parravicini. “The shades are like tempering clouds. We also had to figure out how to get guests into the hotel without passing through the boutiques on the first and second levels. The answer is a vertical first-floor reception area with three transparent lifts that shuttle you to the fourth, main level, where the cherry wood paneling of the restaurant recalls the grid of the original façade.”

For guest rooms that document the evolution of modern design, Piano was assisted by Franco Mirenzi, also of Milan. One room type has seating by Harry Bertoia and Josef Hoffmann. Another is furnished with a desk by Sir Norman Foster, a chair by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, and a table lamp by Achille Castiglioni. Yet another draws on the oeuvres of Eero Saarinen, Jean-Michel Frank and Mies van der Rohe.

Renzo Piano did not single out Lingotto in his speech accepting the Pritzker Prize at the White House in 1998, but it’s clear the heroic commission informed his remarks. “Architecture is like an iceberg,” he said. “In the seven-eighths of the iceberg that lie below water, we find the forces that push architecture up, that allow the tip to emerge: society, science and art.”